Tea With Hitler

By Maureen Dowd

Published: June 11, 2000

Diana Mitford was Hitler's ideal woman. She was tall. She was blond. She was beautiful. She was smart. She was aristocratic. She was anti-Semitic. She was fascist. She was ruthless.

What an uber-babe.

This Aryan moon goddess and friend of Winston Churchill was able to penetrate Hitler's inner circle before the war because she was ''the living embodiment of his racial theories,'' Jan Dalley, the literary editor of The Financial Times, suggests in her straightforward biography, ''Diana Mosley.'' The presence of Diana and her sister Unity, ''two big shining blond angels, or Angles,'' may have even allowed the Fhrer ''to think that England was somehow, deep down in the genes, already his.''

Diana was one of ''the fabulous and not-so-fabulous Mitford girls,'' as Christopher Hitchens calls the quintessentially colorful, eccentric family of the English squirearchy that inspired reams of fiction, nonfiction and tabloid stories. Nancy Mitford, Diana's older sister and a pal of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton, began chronicling her ''barmy'' family with its peculiar argot -- ''Damn sewer!'' ''Stinks to merry hell!'' -- while it was still growing. She produced such charming novels as ''The Pursuit of Love,'' ''Love in a Cold Climate'' and ''The Blessing.'' Nancy was a tease with, as her friend James Lees-Milne said, a ''sharp little barb, barely concealed like the hook of an angler's fly beneath a riot of gay feathers.'' Jessica Mitford wrote ''The American Way of Death.''

Nancy and Diana were very clever and very competitive girls, members of the Bright Young Things, the blithe and brittle London society set of the 1920's -- butterflies that could sting like scorpians -- lampooned by Waugh in ''Vile Bodies'' (dedicated to Diana and her first husband). The sisters hid their emotions behind a lightly malicious banter and a languid upper-crust drawl. But Diana was a serious girl, never as interested in fun for fun's sake as Nancy. Aching -- a favorite Mitford word -- to get away from home, Diana met the nice Bryan Guinness of the brewery dynasty at a debutante party and married him at 18. She got pregnant and spent a lot of time chatting in her bedroom with Waugh, who fell in love with her while his own marriage to Evelyn Gardner, known as She-Evelyn, was breaking up (he fictionalized this amitie amoureuse in his story ''Work Suspended'').

''Diana's translucent beauty and high-spirited charm had already accustomed her to male admiration, even adoration, but she was never particularly interested in sexual affairs,'' Dalley writes. ''What she liked best were clever, chatty friends who would widen her horizons without romantic complications.'' After she gave birth and returned to her duties as a young society beauty, Waugh got jealous and sulkily cut her off for 35 years. When she had her second child, Desmond, in 1931, she had to settle for the company of Lytton Strachey, the Bloomsburyite who had a famous dislike of babies. As Dalley recounts: ''The nurse came back into the room, holding Desmond, with his mop of black hair. Lytton was horrified and curious, and the nurse airily explained that lots of babies are born with fluffy black hair and that it would 'all come off.' 'Oh!' replied Strachey with his characteristic shriek. 'Is it a wig?' ''

In the spring of 1932, the ''cigarette-slim'' Diana went to a dinner dance in ''a pale gray dress of chiffon and tulle, and all the diamonds I could lay my hands on.'' She fell hard for Sir Oswald Mosley. Diana had a taste for the extreme and ''an idealistic tendency to hero-worship,'' Dalley writes. ''When Mosley preached the fascist message to Diana, she was an apt as well as a willing pupil, and an eager convert. 'What else was there?' she said, at the end of her life -- she felt both the Tory and Labor parties were dismal failures.''

Mosley was equally smitten, although he had no intention of leaving his wife or cutting back on his philandering among bored young society matrons. The motto of this renowned rake and Rudolph Valentino look-alike was ''Vote Labor; sleep Tory.'' At one point he decided to confess all his affairs to his warmhearted wife, Cimmie. ''All,'' he told a friend, ''except her stepmother and her sister.'' Diana left her husband to live openly as Mosley's mistress. And, in between fencing lessons and vacations in the South of France and Venice, Mosley met with Mussolini and formed the British Union of Fascists in October 1932, making a uniform of collarless black shirts for his ''Blackshirts.''

While Mosley was fooling with fascism and other women, Diana became fascinated with Germany and ''drawing-room Nazis.'' Her younger sister Unity, already a fascist and longing to be a Nazi, drove around England with swastika pennants flying from her car and gave the Nazi salute to ''family, friends and the astonished postmistress in Swinbrook village.'' Diana was not so obvious as her less brainy and less gorgeous sister. But she ''wanted fire and brimstone,'' Dalley writes. And she saw the Nazis as a dating tool. If she insinuated herself into their inner circle, she could get valuable political connections for her man. Diana traveled to Munich and watched the first Nuremberg rally. She adopted the Nazi line on Jews, as Dalley observes: ''The Jews were 1 percent of the population, but the press only ever talked about them; Hitler would build a wonderful new nation for the 99 percent. Did they not deserve equal concern?'' Unity boldly stalked Hitler, loitering at his favorite osteria in Munich.